Considerations on Representative GovernmentMill, John Stuart
PhilosophyPhilosophy
Considerations on Representative Government
Mill, John Stuart
Representative government and representation
With all this array of reasons, of the most fundamental character, on
the affirmative side of the question, what is there on the negative?
Nothing that will sustain examination, when people can once be induced
to bestow any real examination upon a new thing. Those indeed, if any
such there be, who, under pretense of equal justice, aim only at
substituting the class ascendancy of the poor for that of the rich,
will of course be unfavorable to a scheme which places both on a
level. But I do not believe that any such wish exists at present among
the working classes of this country, though I would not answer for the
effect which opportunity and demagogic artifices may hereafter have in
exciting it. In the United States, where the numerical majority have
long been in full possession of collective despotism, they would
probably be as unwilling to part with it as a single despot or an
aristocracy. But I believe that the English democracy would as yet be
content with protection against the class legislation of others,
without claiming the power to exercise it in their turn.
Among the ostensible objectors to Mr. Hare's scheme, some profess to
think the plan unworkable; but these, it will be found, are generally
people who have barely heard of it, or have given it a very slight and
cursory examination. Others are unable to reconcile themselves to the
loss of what they term the local character of the representation. A
nation does not seem to them to consist of persons, but of artificial
units, the creation of geography and statistics. Parliament must
represent towns and counties, not human beings. But no one seeks to
annihilate towns and counties. Towns and counties, it may be presumed,
are represented when the human beings who inhabit them are
represented. Local feelings can not exist without somebody who feels
them, nor local interests without somebody interested in them. If the
human beings whose feelings and interests these are have their proper
share of representation, these feelings and interests are represented
in common with all other feelings and interests of those persons. But
I can not see why the feelings and interests which arrange mankind
according to localities should be the only one thought worthy of being
represented; or why people who have other feelings and interests,
which they value more than they do their geographical ones, should be
restricted to these as the sole principle of their political
classification. The notion that Yorkshire and Middlesex have rights
apart from those of their inhabitants, or that Liverpool and Exeter
are the proper objects of the legislator's care, in contradistinction
the population of those places, is a curious specimen of delusion
produced by words.
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